


Curses, Blasphemies, and Lamentations

by Huntsmonsters



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Alternate History, Gen, Spoilers, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-11
Updated: 2013-12-11
Packaged: 2018-01-04 07:56:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1078478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huntsmonsters/pseuds/Huntsmonsters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"And then," Rosalind says, standing up and wiping her hands on her breeches, "We will try again."</i> The twins who aren't twins spend a little time in time and space. Vignettes of the Luteces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Curses, Blasphemies, and Lamentations

Behind the scenes  
Of life's vastness, in the abyss' darkest corner  
I see distinctly bizarre worlds,  
And ecstatic victim of my own clairvoyance,  
I drag along with me, serpents that bite my shoes.  
And it's since that time that, like the prophets,  
I love so tenderly the desert and the sea;  
That I laugh at funerals and weep at festivals  
And find a pleasant taste in the most bitter wine;  
That very often I take facts for lies  
And that, my eyes raised heavenward, I fall in holes.  
But the Voice consoles me and it says: "Keep your dreams;  
Wise men do not have such beautiful ones as fools!"

\- **La Voix** , Charles Baudelaire (Trans. William Aggeler), _The Flowers of Evil_

They are - were - at the Frost Fair. Rosalind suggested it - or they were simply there. Then, it was today, and tomorrow, everyone would be dead, or not yet born, or never to be born, and they would be somewhere else.

There are times when there is no Frost Fair in 1683. There are places where the piers were all cleared from the Thames by a great flood, and London was unseasonably warm as global temperatures spiked in a period historians would later call 'The Little Heatwave'. Most include the frost, though, the cold and the frozen women curled in alleyways, the kings eating sweetmeats and taking souvenir cards. 

Rosalind read about the brutal winter of 1683 as a girl. Now, here they were. There were musicians gathered by the bank, their chairs fixed into divets chiseled in the ice. The two of them had already been to the printer's and bought their cards, which declared in elaborate typography that the card had been printed on the Thames itself. Rosalind carried hers tucked in her hair. Robert folded his up, and slid it behind his ear.

They danced.

"I read about this," Robert said. Dancing on ice was a tricky thing, but they managed. They both lead. "Revelry on the Thames. I learned about volcanoes, after. Decided I didn't want to go into them."

"Too much heat," said Rosalind. Her foot dipped back beneath her skirts, then forward. Their clothes were appropriate, because it suited to be dressed for the weather (rain slickers in the rain, suits and dresses and riding costumes and draping togas, and sometimes they switched and Rosalind wore the suits, and no one ever knew a thing about it). Rosalind did not let curls hang to her collarbone, as was the fashion, but her hair was pinned and her mantua correct and fastened snugly. It wasn't easy to dance in petticoats and high shoes, but she had already kicked the shoes loose. Her stocking feet were almost numb, pins and needles. But feeling the bumpy, hard ice under her feet, the hard packed snow, she would not give that up to have soles. "And ash."

"Charcoal is good for drawing," Robert conceded.

"But not for a subject of study," Rosalind concluded. Robert wheeled her around, around again, and then she turned him. They leaned in and out, back and forth, one and then the other. This was their way. "Electricity has an elegance that fire only dreams about."

"In its darkest dreams," said Robert. He cut a fine figure in his long waistcoat. Over Rosalind's shoulder he could see the king and his train staring, but he did not stop dancing. Their clothes were to the letter, but the dance anachronistic. Some stared. A boy pointed at the whirling couple with red hair, listing so strangely from port to bow like a ship that sank by inches. 

They looked exactly like the puppets in the booth.There was a red haired woman and a red haired man, both dressed in plain clothes of a single color, dancing comically together as the puppeteer minced them about the little stage.

The onlookers were in fits of giggles watching the parody of courtly dance. "Ah!" cried the boy. "There!" But when the other children turned to look, there was no one dancing before the musicians. There were only circles, beautiful and concentric, swept in the dusting of snow on the ice.

 

"Shall we go?" Robert asks.

"Not yet," Rosalind replies. 

"We have business to take care of," Robert reminds. He has his arms folded, leaning against the cold stone wall of the cell. The texture is uneven under his back. He wears only his favorite suit, here. No one can see. The guards only check on the prisoners when it pleases them to beat them, or they are given money to provide the wealthy ones with every comfort they could desire. Revolution will rob those prisoners of this privilege in two years time. Or it won't. Two cells away, a man weeps, his voice like a badly strung instrument, no water in him to make tears with. _Je meurs de faim. M'entends tu? Quelqu'un m'entends? Je meurs de faim._

"The 63rd order of business."

"Is it?"

"You know it is."

"Yes." 

Robert palms his coin. He keeps the Eagle in his pocket. It is a reminder of where he has been, if not where he came from. He left all his dollar bills behind him - they changed presidents too often, and it grew somewhat unnerving, even for him.

"How many more times?" he asks. Rosalind is on the ground. She has a handkerchief around her head, and she is just finishing with the chisel. She will leave behind a tunnel between this cell and the next that notes can be passed through. The room is covered in filthy straw, and it stinks of humans treated like horses. High in the wall, a barred window ekes in sunlight and fresh air. He can hear seagulls cawing past the cliffs, and the waves on the rocks. 

"As many."

"As many as it takes," Robert says. She looks back at him, and he smiles at her like an old photograph. He knows that this is a place where they diverge. What happens to the girl has weighed on him, all this time. The girl, the world, the man, the city. And them at the root of the tree that spirals up and branches out a billion billion fingers.

"And then," Rosalind says, standing up and wiping her hands on her breeches, "We will try again."

"No," Robert says, with eyes like flint. She steps up close to him, and places her hand on his. No more tries. There will be nothing left, then.

"No," she agrees. He nods. And whatever the price, she will pay it, for this hand, that nod, this next step into the next time round.

 

After they stroke away from the dock, Robert slows his rowing, and Rosalind peers over the bow. The storm lashes them both, and she has to keep her fingers tamped down on her yellow rain hat to keep the wind from ripping it straight off her head. She can only see a few feet out over the surf, and the night is as dark as the space between doors.

"He's going in."

"Is he?"

"Yes."

"Didn't wait?"

"Not a second."

"Not even the note?"

"Hardly read it."

Robert hums and pulls on the oars again, and they skip across the waves toward the next lighthouse. "This one's a fighter."

"Maybe this time, then."

 

A moment passes, and then the boat moves again. "No," Robert says.

"Why?" Rosalind has her notebook in her lap. It is summer on the river behind their childhood home, and the heather trails in the slow-moving water. They coast, mostly on the faint current. Robert pulls in the oars.

"Heads or tails," Robert reminds. Rosalind scoffs.

"Things change."

"Will they?"

She has her head leaned back against the wood, and she lifts her low slung gaze long enough to narrow an eye. 

"You know they do."

Robert lays down in the boat. Their feet make a neat row - his right between her right and left, her right against the outside of his left, one, two, three, four. A boot, then a shoe, then a boot, then a shoe again. They remind her of chess pieces, all neatly doubled and intersecting on checks in black and white. No, not the pieces. They are inlays - one, then the other, but all of a contiguous piece, perfectly proportioned. They are the board on which the pieces move and move again and are reset. One day they will see a checkmate. She doesn't know what will happen to them, then. It is a dark space in the bright points that stretch out within her reach in every direction, What they have now is all she ever dreamed of as a girl. But she will do it. Right, left, rightleft. She's been thinking, and he's been watching her, reading it in her. She knows. 

"I know," he says. She doesn't need to nod. They knew she was right before she thought she might be.

 

The city is burning. A news ticker, too high up to be read easily in all the smoke, is scrolling something about the sky city Columbia in bright red letters. People are screaming, buildings as tall as mountains are falling, and ghosts without true voices sprint down city streets and fit new citizens with masks. There is a sound of a horn in the distance, and Robert's hair stands on end. Some things you don't get used to.

"We said we wouldn't come back here," he says. He turns away from Rosalind, and looks down the street. Cars half the size of the sharpest Model T are overturned on each other, and cars twice the size of one are halfway in, halfway out of glass shopfronts. All glitters and is hazy in sharp edges and pitch smoke. The roar of Columbia overhead and the fighting in the city is deafening. It has made him deaf, actually. He touches his ear, and comes away with blood.

Rosalind says nothing. He can't hear her of course. He knows what she is thinking. "I needed to see it again," she doesn't say. Robert rubs the sticky blood between his fingers. "I had to remember."

 

She is pulling a sandwich board over his head. He can hear again. They found a remedy for that sort of thing a long time ago, trillions of miles and just a step or two away. They store it in a quiet place that only they know, along with the tests. A few hundred jewelry boxes, a sack full of Eagles, stacks of notecards and postcards and boxes. It is Rosalind's consolation, and though Robert pursues these ends for different means, he too enjoys the experiments. There is no scientist who could know what they know now and not want to play. Just a little.

"Heads?" he asks. "Or tails?" she asks. They are out of place at the carnival even as they fit impeccably. The clothes are appropriate, but their behavior an anachronism. They are an anachronism. They are, anachronistically, fine.

 

\- **Les Phares** , Charles Baudelaire (Trans. Roy Campbell), _The Flowers of Evil_

These curses, blasphemies, and lamentations,  
These ecstasies, tears, cries and soaring psalms —  
Through endless mazes, their reverberations  
Bring, to our mortal hearts, divinest balms.  
A thousand sentinels repeat the cry.  
A thousand trumpets echo. Beacon-tossed  
A thousand summits flare it through the sky,  
A call of hunters in the jungle lost.  
And certainly this is the most sublime  
Proof of our worth and value, Oh Divinity,  
That this great sob rolls on through ageless time  
To die upon the shores of your infinity.  



End file.
